“The Logic Is Built Right into the Architecture”: Speculative Architecture in Contemporary Queer-of-Color Science Fiction

Each of the four sections of Rivers Solomon’s novel An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), a space opera that tracks the colossal passenger ship Matilda as it travels through space away from a ravaged Earth, is labeled with a different branch of science: thermodynamics, metallurgy, phylogeny, and, finally, astromatics.1 Unlike its three counterparts, “astromatics” is not a field of study that exists in our world. Although related to “astronautics”—the science and technology of human space travel and exploration (“Astronautics, N.”)—and “astromantics”—divination by means of the stars (“Astromantic, N.”)—“astromatics,” as Solomon puts forth, implies a new direction. The term is never defined outright in the text, but its component parts—from the Greek “astron” for “star” (“Astro-, comb. form”), “mata” for “thought” (“Automaton, N.”), and “-ic,” “pertaining to” (“-ic, suffix, sense 1.a”)—suggest a combination of existing terms: both a science that studies the stars and an urge that ceaselessly tracks or pursues them, for good or ill. Guided by the stars, by astromatic knowledge, the Matilda never crashes. An Unkindness of Ghosts never narrates a harrowing passage through an asteroid belt; it never describes an attack by hostile extraterrestrials; the ship is never sucked perilously into the gravity of a rogue planet. The Matilda’s passage through the cosmos is, indeed, uneventful, with the narrative instead focusing on the plight of its occupants. The expedition’s success, it is quickly revealed, is contingent on the violent subjugation of enslaved Black people, whose labor enables the functioning of the ship and facilitates the comfort of the white passengers on the uppermost decks. The central conflict of the novel is that the ship is functioning exactly as intended.